|
|
|
|
|
|
|
trap door n. (alt. trapdoor) 1. Syn. back door a Bad Thing. 2. [techspeak] A trap-door function is one which is easy to compute but very difficult to compute the inverse of. Such functions are Good Things with important applications in cryptography, specifically in the construction of public-key cryptosystems. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
trash vt. To destroy the contents of (said of a data structure). The most common of the family of near-synonyms including mung, mangle, and scribble. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
trawl v. To sift through large volumes of data (e.g., Usenet postings, FTP archives, or the Jargon File) looking for something of interest. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
tree-killer n. [Sun] 1. A printer. 2. A person who wastes paper. This epithet should be interpreted in a broad sense; 'wasting paper' includes the production of spiffy but content-free documents. Thus, most suits are tree-killers. The negative loading of this term may reflect the epithet 'tree-killer' applied by Treebeard the Ent to the Orcs in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (see also elvish, elder days). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
treeware /tree'weir/ n. Printouts, books, and other information media made from pulped dead trees. Compare tree-killer, see documentation. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
trit /trit/ n. [by analogy with 'bit'] One base-3 digit; the amount of information conveyed by a selection among one of three equally likely outcomes (see also bit). Trits arise, for example, in the context of a flag that should actually be able to assume three values such as yes, no, or unknown. Trits are sometimes jokingly called 3-state bits. A trit may be semi-seriously referred to as a bit and a half, although it is linearly equivalent to 1.5849625 bits (that is, log2(3) bits). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
trivial adj. 1. Too simple to bother detailing. 2. Not worth the speaker's time. 3. Complex, but solvable by methods so well known that anyone not utterly cretinous would have thought of them already. 4. Any problem one has already solved (some claim that hackish trivial usually evaluates to 'I've seen it before'). Hackers' notions of triviality may be quite at variance with those of non-hackers. See nontrivial, uninteresting. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The physicist Richard Feynman, who had the hacker nature to an amazing degree (see his essay "Los Alamos From Below" in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!), defined trivial theorem as "one that has already been proved". |
|
|
|
|
|